configuring in absence

[Alan Sondheim]

configuring in absence


i have been disappearing. first i bought a sharp zaurus 5500 with linux
and have downloaded numerous applications; i use a sandisk card with it
for wireless and signed up for tmobile but it's quite expensive. i am
using both cf and sd cards for storage, and have been reading materials
from iran. i had to configure a number of programs and found a small perl
which runs beautifully with my text scripts. i also bought a small rubber
keyboard which will be replaced by a hard plastic infrared one in the near
future. the zaurus synchronizes with the hp laptop running winxp home. i
then sold my mac g3 powerbook and turned my 300 mhz compaq desktop into a
local store to have a new 1.4 motherboard installed with the older 24 gb
hard drives and 200 mhz ram. i had originally tried running redhat 9 and
then fedora on it; both ran impossibly slow, but i liked redhat better.
when the box was returned with the new hardware, including a new video
board as well, i installed redhat 9 again, and it ran well, but was on
occasion producing kernel errors which were forwarded to the root account.
and x window wouldn't run at all until a second video board replaced the
first with considerably more ram. at this point i tried to install
mandrake 9.2 after a bad crash in redhat 9 - i had turned off the machine
without shutdown -h now in text mode and after that x wouldn't come up
except in such a safe mode that a black screen and cursor were all that
remained - and during the install, i went through numerous partitionings,
settling finally on the recommended, after which the error appeared that
no ide devices found, and the install disk wouldn't exit the cdrom tray.
so i tried using the redhat floppy boot disk i made since the formatting
hadn't started, and the floppy drive was also inoperable. the cdrom
install disk had to be manually removed. now that the machine was empty, i
tried rebooting, only to have it stall, not even reaching, as far as i
could tell, the bios, since i couldn't bring the bios up, again getting
the message search for ide devices and coming up empty. so the machine is
back at the shop. meanwhile we installed verizon dsl which went in easily
with ethernet to the hp laptop, and i added a linksys wireless-b, all i
could afford, router instead of the cable; due to my abysmal ignorance,
verizon had to walk me through the desktop configuration. the zaurus
immediately responded well, but in the other room, i found i couldn't
connect an old win 98 desktop because it wasn't se and the software was
problematic if i had managed to get the ethernet card working in the first
place, so this has been put on hold. when all goes well in the future, if
it ever does - azure said i should have bought that 350 usd linux box now
made by hp and she's right - i'll install cinelerra, xmovie, etc.; one of
the biggest problems with linux is the lack of mid-range to low-range
applications for video editing in common formats; i haven't found anything
reasonable for qt yet for example. on the zaurus i've had some luck with
image processing software for still images, but have yet to get any of my
own work to run on it; i've got the older operating system rom at the
moment, and if i upgrade, sharp promises not only will the work be lost,
but the backup/restore function won't work. when i was installing the
verizon software on the hp laptop by the way, one tech advisor completely
gave up and i used the winxp restore to take all of it off and start over,
after which things were at least, although barely, recognized. there's
nothing like restore points as a safety net; too bad we can't do that with
real life. meanwhile i've been working with gimp since on occasion even on
windows photoshop crashes and gimp doesn't, and creating small videos
which are also based, as today's, on drawings completed in a sketch
program for the zaurus; oddly, the zaurus has been quite useful for
content creation. i have given the older dell 600 mhz linux laptop i had,
to my brother, along with the redhat 7 and 8 disks i had; i wasn't able to
configure the orinoco wireless card for it, no matter how i tried. and it
wouldn't work with the mac - not this particular card, according to
orinoco. a third laptop, an old ast at 100 mhz but with 40 megs of ram,
was used for text-based linux, but i finally gave that away, as well as a
small phenom with wince 2.1, slightly upgraded, that had a bad backup
battery and an annoying habit of losing applications as a result. i had
also received an older palm pda which i had configured with numerous
programs; i also gave my brother this one, after i found that the zaurus
did pretty much all i needed. there were no palm applications on the
zaurus of course, but there are several readers that can do the doc and
pdb etc. files, although i stopped short of putting on the emulator, since
there are too many things close to conflicting already at the moment. i
installed the avant browser on the hp laptop which i quite like, as well
as the konqueror browser for the zaurus in addition to the opera which
comes with it, but the former tends to add various cache files while the
opera erases them, and since there is very little ram on the 5500, even
with an optimizer i installed, i tend to use the latter. it's difficult
to configure the linux in the zaurus, since everything seems peculiarly
linked - go in a couple of directories, and you'll find yourself looping
back to root or something that seems awfully similar. i still can't find
the favorites.txt i want to configure for the webcam application; it's got
to be somewhere (the app runs on jeode, zaurus' java environment), but so
far everything's turned up empty. i found zauruszone one of the best sites
for configuration and downloads by the way, although there are numerous
others i use as well. the sony f717 digital camera wouldn't work, by the
way, with redhat 9, no matter what i did; the machine went down before i
had the opportunity to try it with the new board, or with fedora or
mandrake 9.2. i had also installed suse at one point, running off the
cdrom; suse laid down a few files in the linux root directory, and for all
of this naturally the bios had to be changed so that the machine would
boot in the first place from cdrom. i've now got another problem, an older
sparc-like workstation i want to use with my current dell monitor, but the
workstation has a four-bnc output cable, and the dell monitor, a five-bnc
input; i'm not sure what to connect where and am a little bit worried
about overloading either voltage or scan rate. for the zaurus, i also
bought an extra battery and a small device which takes 4 nimh rechargables
- down below 6 volts, which might harm the power supply, but the zaurus
has difficulties recognizing the latter, and the zaurus' apm command and
graphic power meter is incredibly primitive and useless - although i heard
it's better on the newer rom - the one i mentioned is only one of several,
but i'm really tiring of configuring things - there are times i've
installed linux say 7-8 times of an evening, and need to have some sort of
stable environment to work in, which seems a long time coming, now that
the refurbished desktop is back in the shop again.


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